It is rising in me

It is rising in me. Like lava slowly boiling. I can feel it. About to burst forth. I hope it is less destructive than lava. Like a beautiful molten joy or love. Like a seed geminating. Covered in dark, dirty soil. The fertile void is a term I learned from Kate Northrup. I have to be honest, I am currently a hopeless gardener. Pretty much everything I try to grow dies a very sad death. It’s a bit of a joke between my family and friends and me. One of the women I nannied for in my 20s only ever had one bad thing to say about me when I used her for a job reference later in life, “Just don’t let her take care of your plants.” I have helped a lot of plants on their way to the compost heap. But I appreciate the brilliance of gardening and growing analogies. I especially love the ideas of things like bulbs. These ugly, slimy things lie dormant all winter and then, just when you wonder if they’ve all rotted and given up for good, they rise up and offer splashes of color and reminders of their splendor and cues the memory with the stories of beauty they have told before. That is what I feel like I have growing and geminating in me. An old story of beauty, an old story of community. I have a vision of mothers and grandmothers, aunties and sisters joining hands and raising babies and families together with grace and a spirit of many hands making light work. This is not what I see in my work and in my life. When I close my eyes and vision myself as the mother of my dreams it is within the arms of my sisters, friends, aunties, mothers, grandmothers, and tribeswomen of my heart. I am sitting near their hearth fires, being nurtured on the soups of their loving kindness and hearing loving words and hearing the lullabies sung to their children and children’s children. We have gotten further and further from this truth as a culture. American parenting is a minefield of pressure and judgment. It is a perfectionist’s nightmare or dream come true depending on which side of Pinterest Perfection your children wake up on. I see parents becoming more and more isolated from other parents, from their partners, and from each other. There is so much in our system that keeps us separated and isolated from each other. Don’t get me wrong, I think parenting should be a sacrifice, it just shouldn’t require a woman’s entire soul or identity. It shouldn’t require sacrificing marriages or a person’s entire mental wellbeing. But with the current set up we have, it sometimes does. Truly, it most often does. I want to change that. I want to change the conversation. I want to change the culture around this. I am loving the little pockets of change I am seeing. I love seeing people who are changing the conversation. People who are striving for more sustainability in their businesses, families, communities. I love it. It’s amazing. So much of the connection that parents, especially moms do now is done online now. This can be brilliant. In a moment, instead of feeling isolated and alone with your screaming infant and engorged breasts you CAN connect with other moms in the same exact situation. However, I see this exact same technology causing just as much isolation and stress as it does connection and care. In this culture of mean girls and internet bullies, we have lots of examples of women shaming other women and flinging nastiness and blame. Fortunately, I have been so blessed to have multiple examples of healing and restorative stories of groups of women coming alongside each other to uplift and empower. Sometimes I feel shocked by my own good experiences since I too have had my share of bad ones. And yet, when I reflect, I see groups of women (online and off) are like anything great and powerful—our greatest strength can be our greatest weakness. We have such great power to support and uplift each other and so it makes sense that the other side of this would be to tear down and destroy. Women, who have the potential to create life, also have great capacity to destroy. Parents, who have great capacity to love, have great capacity to harm. The double-edged sword. The beauty is that we get to choose. We might have to fight like hell for that choice and weather the winter and the fertile void, but we can choose the people to support us, the community to come around us, and the love we need to create the lives we want. Stay tuned for more ways we can come together to support each other. One way is to head over to our facebook page or Instagram and join the mamathrivevilage and the conversation. https://www.facebook.com/mamathrivevillage/https://www.instagram.com/mamathrivevillage/ Written by Danielle D. Jenkins, PsyD